


Illustrious Pagans

by febricant



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Drug Use, Five Times, Group Sex, Immortality, Mild Kink, Multi, bullying your uptight younger brother
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:48:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25549225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/febricant/pseuds/febricant
Summary: Yusuf realised with a pleasant and slightly surprised jolt that he was perhaps cripplingly high on something wildly hallucinogenic.or:Five times Joe and Nicky did drugs.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 84
Kudos: 717





	Illustrious Pagans

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Door](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Door/gifts).



> Look, I'm a grown-up. I know drugs are bad and fun's not allowed, but also I don't care. Additional warnings for sex while high, and also, at one point ayahuasca is used by non-indigenous characters. Proceed as you will.
> 
> Nobody beta read this, I haven't posted anything in years and all my fucks are gone

Five Times, and you know the rest

1.

Nicky said: “Yes, I will try,” sometime around the mid twentieth century, perhaps somewhere in what was then Spain. Joe --then still Yusuf, or sometimes, for the mortals who had difficulty with the phonemes, Ioseph, or simply a small smile and no name at all-- hadn’t heard the question, only Nicolo’s answer.

The small mystery was solved when Nicolo handed him half, a curled handful of small mushrooms, brown and unassuming, and went back to kissing the nearest body, the languid form between them both, bracketed by others, gently awash with the familiar smoke of hashish, all of them.

If Nico was going to try something, Joe would try something. Better to risk it together, so that if one fell the other would be there to catch them, or to follow him under.

The mushrooms tasted of nothing, of sawdust and pulp, and Yusuf caught Nico’s eye over the bent head in his lap, fingers idly stroking through soft hair, someone else’s, texture not familiar the way Nico’s was, and had been for centuries. “What is it meant to taste like?” Yusuf asked, in Arabic, for Nico, who understood him perfectly, even slurred from pleasure and smoke.

“Tastes like dust to me,” Nico shrugged, Ligurian vowels still ghosting around words Yusuf had taught him when they had been young, almost a thousand years ago. “Food here really suffered after the expulsions.”

Yusuf smiled at him and kept his thoughts to himself, remembering Nicolo a hundred ways, drunk and sated and hungry and restless and once with his pupils wide enough to see the moon in, the jungle that was now recently Bolivia or Peru or somewhere with a sharper border all around them, frogs croaking eerily in the canopy of trees. “I don’t think the taste will be imperative.”

Niolo smirked at him, and lay down again, nest of pillows and blankets and bodies looking right somehow, both of them fixed points in a moving picture, until forty minutes or so later when time began to warp and fragment around them, and the linearity and rightness of things seemed far less important.

Nicolo was a lightless starburst, a sleeping fire, a tangle of distorted joints and a perfectly new thing all at once, and everyone else in the room --kind, welcoming, hedonistic young souls-- began to side out of his mind, and Yusuf realised with a pleasant and slightly surprised jolt that he was perhaps cripplingly high on something wildly hallucinogenic.

He laughed and it had a colour. He touched Nico and it had a sound, a rasping, gentle harmonic as his skin distorted wonderfully beneath his hand. His own fingers elongated, travelled Nico’s body, cupping themselves around his sharp chin as Yusuf tried to taste him just as Nico began to reverently and fixedly curl his hands into Yusuf’s hair, as though transfixed by the texture and length of it.

It was always easy to remember how deep and irrevocable his love was, and some new and interesting temporal dimension of it seemed correct in a cosmic sense, just then.

Joe couldn’t have guessed how long it lasted, the brilliant connectedness hanging in strands all around them. That was the way of hallucinogens, for Joe, who had been, and still was, Yusuf, sometimes. The length the experience was not the part which mattered, until Joe woke up with his face buried tight in the back of Nico’s neck, pressed against the peeling wall of their host’s house, to find Booker staring balefully down at all of them, his hangdog face looking even more sleepless and dismayed than he habitually did.

“Morning, Sebastien,” Nico mumbled, and Joe could tell he was smiling, even over the stirrings of their collection of temporary friends, who had all been badly startled. “What’s the matter?”

Joe sorted French into his mind, not yet ready to speak.

“How many times?” Booker sounded out, morosely. Hell below, he was young. “How many times have I asked you _not_ to fuck your way into my _dreams._ ”

“Come on, Le Livre,” Joe mumbled. “It was probably much more fun than what you were thinking about.”

“I hate you,” Booker said, glancing around the morning-after scene he’d marched his way into with the expression of a hound separated from its pack yet determined to keep hold of a scent. “I’m not joking.”

“Book,” Nicolo pronounced. “We love you, too.”

Booker locked eyes with a beautiful young person whose small breasts, smooth face and slim hips gave no indication of their gender, and coloured to the roots of his washed-out hair. “Spare me,” he said, like a prayer, and vanished as quickly as he’d come.

It took Joe a moment to realise Nico was laughing, and then he was helpless against it, like always.

“Who was that?” asked a rather handsome Catalonian whose name Joe could not quite remember, though he felt he knew it.

“Our brother,” Nicky explained.

“You’re brothers?” asked their startled companion. “What?”

Joe kept his smile hidden in Nicky’s shoulder until Nico struggled through a white lie, and then later, when they had dressed and left, wandering through the morning-quiet streets, Nico smacked him gently in the arm. “He dreams of mud, mostly, I think.”

“That explains the squelching,” Joe said, making Nicky lean into him with his quiet laughter.

2.

Before Booker and after Quynh, Nicolo di Genova and Yusuf al-Kaysani spent a little bit of time alone.

It wasn’t planned, as such, but something had broken between them and Andromache the way things did with families, occasionally. Hundreds of years of _family_ meant a few breaks along the way.

Where had they been, when Andromache and Quynh were captured by witch hunters, whose belief in the supernatural did not include the supranatural in any useful or meaningful way? How long had Nicolo and Yusuf searched for them, catching glimpses of Quynh and Andromache’s pain and fear in dreams and waking moments in which their own thoughts were quiet? How late had they been, saviours after the fact, once the cruelty of Quynh’s fate had been dealt to all of them in smaller measures?

Andromache hadn’t been able to look at them together.

Sometimes, healing was space.

“We could keep looking,” Nicolo said, somewhere in the North Sea, a cold and bleak expanse of water he had never liked.

“You hate the cold, my love,” Yusuf said, drawing him closer, the ship they had taken for their own a whole world, divorced from land. They could jump in and drift, and eventually they would be washed ashore, probably no worse for the trip. Nicolo leaned back into him, buoyed by Yusuf’s eternal warmth at his back. “Let’s go south.”

“How far south?”

“As far south as piracy can take us, I should think.”

“We’re not pirates.”

“We are not anything,” Yusuf pointed out. “We’re anything we want to be, and we are only ourselves.”

Nicolo did sometimes find himself irritated when Yusuf made pronouncements like that, but there was truth to it, and between them, Nicolo prized nothing higher. “South, then. Maybe we will find her along the way.”

They shipwrecked near what would eventually be renamed Panama and washed ashore, and something in Nicolo almost refused to wake up, a kind of night which lingered in his heart even through the great change in seasons which was crossing into the southern hemisphere, the reminder of how small and yet how vast the world was doing nothing to enlighten him.

Yusuf must have sensed it. They had been together for so long that sometimes Nicolo di Genova forgot just how long it had been.

“The Spanish have been here,” Yusuf observed when they had kept walking, following some leadline in Nicolo who refused to stop. “There has been a pox.”

“Did we bring one to Jerusalem, I wonder,” Nicolo murmured, when they stopped outside a town which was hardly anything but a horrible little church and a smattering of cowed villagers, dark heads downcast and frightened of the ire of the thing they had been told was watching them from above which Nicolo had no lingering love for.

“There were many ills in the Holy Land,” Yusuf pointed out. “You can’t take this to your chest, Nico. It will drown you.”

“Lets go, please.”

“Where?”

“In,” Nicolo decided. “I am tired of the coast.”

“We will die, I think. At least once.”

The jungle was a thing neither of them had seen like this, on foot, wanderers.

Both of them had made pilgrimages, once. Nicolo was loath to use his sword for the purposes of clearing brush, but Yusuf had gained them a shortbladed knife with a flat end which was perfect for the purpose, and in they went.

Three days later, Nicolo had expired on the mulch with a gasp after the bite of a particularly venomous snake, and Yusuf had not stopped complaining of insect bites which rippled boils down his arms and legs, and they had both eaten something undoubtedly poisonous, which had set both of them on edge. “Can we go back to piracy, now?” Yusuf asked, when Nicolo gasped himself back to lie with his head in Yusuf’s warm, damp lap, his fingers catching at the new length of Nicolo’s hair, curled into limp waves in the heat.

“I would say yes,” he said, “but I think we will have to ask someone else.”

“The ones you were hoping to meet?” Yusuf asked, eyeing the high-boned, dark-eyed people who had all come with weapons, staring at Nicolo, who had been dead not a moment before. “Should I tell them you’re not a priest anymore? Would it help?”

It turned out that Spanish was perfectly well understood, but did not prevent either of them from experiencing a violent death by perforation, which beat a snake bite for swiftness, but was just as undignified.

Nicolo woke up first, and tried Spanish again, forehead pressed into Yusuf’s, waiting for his breath to come back, wanting to offer him all of his own, if he needed it.

Yusuf gasped back to life to find Nicolo had already yanked out the arrow which had killed him, and smiled.

Their stalkers had put down their weapons in shock. “What are you?” asked one, in perfectly serviceable, if oddly-accented Spanish. I sounded new in her mouth, as though she had not had any desire to learn it.

“We’re not sure,” Nicolo told her, just as Yusuf said “together,” with great finality, breaking through the fug Nicolo had been walking around cloaked in, because-- ah, because he was right. He was right, the beautiful, terrible imperfection of him, he was right, they were only alive because they were together. Without him there was nothing, an eternity of void. And now he understood Andromache, in all her glory and her incomparable loss.

Nicolo let the tears come, resting his forehead against Yusuf’s, eyes closed. Breathing him in, feeling the rough skin of his dirtied palms scrape across his cheeks.

“Come,” their would-be attacker said, simply, sheathing her short knife. “Or stay, and go back. Do not be alone here.”

The small village they were led to was hidden by paths cleverly cut through the trees so as to seem untrodden, winding and sophisticated.

Nicolo collapsed into the offered dwelling gratefully, overcome with how much he couldn’t say to them, language in common limited and words essentially worthless for his grief.

On their third day, Yusuf got bored, though he attempted to hide it, fingers stroking idly over Nicolo’s chest and belly, sweat-streaked and slack. He breathed hot against the back of Nicolo’s neck, and Nico felt himself stir for the first time in weeks, perhaps months, the thing in him which utterly belonged to Yusuf, soul-anchored, lifting its head from where it had been hiding. “Are you here, Nicolo?” he asked, in their oldest language. “Or are you at the bottom of the sea?”

“I’m here,” Nicolo told him, closing his eyes to the tightly-woven house around them, their place as strange, alien guests, and felt the breadth and solidity of Yusuf behind him. “We should say hello.”

There was nobody to say hello to, save for the huntress they had encountered in the depths of the jungle, who gazed at them with her nearly-black eyes from under her fringed black hair, as though considering the disparity of them. Nicolo, pale blue and pink, and Yusuf, brown and sunlit. “You are not dead.” She said it like a statement.

“Not yet.” Nicolo inclined his head, hand firmly in Yusuf’s. “Thank you for not trying to kill us again.”

Up close, her skin was rippled with pockmarks, and her forearms ringed with knotted scars. “You are Spanish?”

Yusuf al-Kaysani, whose people had been to Iberia before it was ever Spain, laughed softly. Nicolo di Genova, who had been young when Liguria was the greatest sea power in the West, answered. “Not at all.”

“Then you may stay.” She led them towards the centre of what Nicolo thought might have been a hunting camp, for he saw no children, and few elders, though one did emerge, pounding a mortar into something, a pulp of leaves and branches. “Sit.”

They sat.

“Will you drink with us?”

Yusuf looked at Nicolo, and perhaps saw the answer to whatever question he was about to ask before he'd spoken it. “Yes.”

“It is holy. So, prepare.”

That seemed to be open-ended, to Nicolo, without anything specific to do in preparation, but Yusuf put an arm around his shoulders and whispered in his ear, beard tickling his neck: “what do you think it is?”

“I have no idea.”

“They haven't killed us again, or tried to trap us.”

“Yes, it's refreshing.”

“You led us here. You decide how we prepare.”

Nicolo kissed him.

The elder and the woman paid them no mind at all, and something in Nicolo’s chest broke open like a festered wound, pumping lymph and pus out and away.

It took hours for whatever was in the bowl to render itself, burning down and down, thickening to a crusty, greenish white while night fell, and as the fire grew brighter in the darkness the rest of the people who they didn't know and who had not tried to kill them after learning what they were drew closer.

It was only a small group. Twelve at the most.

They shared no food and no music. The atmosphere was solemn in a way Nicolo had not forgotten, how true spiritual experiences did not choose or discriminate between people or states, and sometimes all anyone needed to have one was patience and to be still enough in some way to receive them.

“You are not gods,” the woman said, again, decisive and factual.

“No.”

“Good.” She took the bowl from the fire after a nod from the elder, and chanted something, low and smooth, far more beautiful to Nicolo's ear than her Spanish, which emerged from her unwillingly, a language twisted into her mouth. She drank, and looked at them with a wide, white smile. “Here,” she said, offering it to them. “Visit with the spirits. Maybe you will find what you seek.”

“I have already found it,” Yusuf said.

Nicolo took the bowl and drank first, thinking of the sea.

The vomiting took them both by surprise, a single turbid stream of bile wrestling itself out of each of their bodies before they collapsed backwards together, staring at the stars staining out above the canopy.

“Jesus, Mary, Mother of God,” Nicolo murmured, as he began to fall upwards and out of his body.

Yusuf’s hand caught his wrist, but he kept floating, this time with him in tow.

It might have been weeks, for all Nicolo could tell, the land a burning plain below them, populated by the tiniest of souls, small even in the vision of whatever they had drunk to get here. Distant under their feet, the world seemed to turn, continuing its ponderous journey around its axes, trapped in motion by the sun. The landscape was nothing like it was in the waking world, a timeless, myriad layer of light and fire and pinpricks of life. “Where do you think we are?” Nicolo asked, knowing he wasn’t really speaking, somehow, drawing the shape of Yusuf closer to him, placing his forehead against his.

A pair of enormous eyes opened, dwarfing the scale of the rotating planet.

“Someone’s house, I guess,” Yusuf said, drowsily. “Is this your hallucination or mine?”

“Does it matter?”

IT DOES NOT said the eyes, watching them benignly.

“Apologies for the intrusion,” Niolo offered.

YOU HAVE BEEN INVITED

“We should have taken off our bloody shoes, Nico.”

The eyes laughed at them, a sound which shook the bones in Nicolo’s spine until he felt himself drifting apart in his own space, stretched back into his form, which had begun to clench and tighten over the last long months.

TRAVELLERS OF SMALL MERCIES said the eyes, blinking greatly, blasting them both with a hot, salted wind. GO HOME. KEEP YOUR SHOES ON.

Nicolo felt one of the great understandings of his long life, regarded by an ancient thing he might have imagined but couldn’t have. Yusuf was here, and he was home. Andromache was somewhere, and she was home, too.

They settled back into their bodies near dawn, blue light washing the green and brown out of the ordinary sights and sounds of the camp. Yusuf blinked slowly awake next to him, and Nicolo could not help himself, rolling over so he was on him, his ear pressed to Yusuf’s broad chest. The heart in there made such a familiar sound that the relief of the vision came back in a rush.

There were people around them, but that had been the case many times, and in many ways. This morning it was simply a fact, and did not stop him from kissing Yusuf, nor from feeling the deep familiarity of is touch, the particular sequence of breaths which meant he was aroused, the soft catch of his fingers against the back of Nicolo’s neck. He felt perfect and whole and alive in Nicolo’s mouth, when he took him, and they were old enough to have learned to be nearly soundless.

When Nicolo had finished, he found the huntress watching them, amused and sitting up by the embers of the fire. “Never seen any men like you do things like that,” she said, whispering.

“What’s your name?” Nicolo asked, while Yusuf smirked silently into the threads of his shirt.

“I’m not going to tell you,” she said. “Too much power in a name.”

“Fair enough,” Yusuf said. “We should leave.”

“Yes, you should. Don’t come back.”

When they made it back to the coast, Andromache was there, a small cutter in port under her command, her cool, pale eyes scanning the town until the moment she caught sight of them. She had cut her hair again, a black crop close to the skull, the bones in her fine face made prominent in the bright sunlight. “Took your fucking time,” she said, by way of greeting. Then: “I missed you.”

They set sail quickly. Andromache needed no supplies she didn’t already have, and something in her might still have been tied to the sea, so neither of them could protest.

It was night on the water when she took them below the deck to her cabin, opened a bottle of wine, and asked them to talk.

“There’s not much more to it,” Nicolo admitted, as the impetus had been his and Yusuf had been immortally patient, for once. “We-- were offered a journey of the mind, and it told us to go home. And here you are.”

“I dreamed of a jungle and came to find you.” Andromache frowned at them. “So you think you met a God?”

“Well--”

“She wasn't as much fun as you.” Yusuf smirked at her. “No matter what she was.”

Nicolo hadn't seen Andromache smile in years, but she wrapped herself into his arms with a grin this time, grabbing at his hair with her punishingly strong grip, kissing his cheek wetly. “I haven't been much fun lately.”

“Let's get drunk,” Nicolo suggested, on solid ground again.

3.

Yusuf declined to enter the wars of Napoleon, as he was busy with something else. Let the French batter themselves against the English. Yusuf had an abundance of opinions on both kinds of Imperialists, and thought they could perhaps smash themselves to bits for a century if they felt like it, and give everyone else a break.

“What does Italy have to say about it?” Yusuf teased Nicolo, one beautiful morning in a city which had once been only a small village indeed by harsh mountains, insignificant until it wasn’t. He tweaked one of Nicolo’s dusty pink nipples, knowing he was already riled.

“Call me Italian again,” Nicolo said, heatless, but rising to the gentle taunt. “I’ll call you an Ottoman, and let’s see how you like it.”

“Your Arabic,” Yusuf said, scenting him. “Terrible, still, after all these years.”

“Maybe if it stopped changing so quickly. Do you still speak your first language or have you forgotten it? It would be a shame.”

“Are you less angry at Alighieri yet, my love?”

“That gutless Florentine bastard. You know I’m not.”

“My Genoan warrior." Nicolo smacked him, protesting the taunt, but Yusuf continued, enjoying himself greatly. "How do you feel about corsairing for a bit?”

“Ambivalent,” Nicolo said, turning back into the blankets. “I would like a time on land, if I may. I think you have too much fun as a pirate.”

“Only because you think there is such a thing as too much fun.”

“I think we ought to see the city before we end up back at sea.” Nicolo kissed him, working Yusuf into the kind of heat only Nicolo provoked; slow-burning and eternal, a coal waiting for a breath. Then he pulled away. “Coffee,” he announced, and got out of bed.

“Cruel, cruel creature,” Yusuf said, sympathising with his penis. “Is he not?”

“I can hear you,” Nicolo informed him, smiling brightly as he wrapped his hair. “Come on. You're not usually lazy. We’ve already missed the first call.”

“Allah will forgive us, that is what Allah does best,” Yusuf mumbled, and followed him.

They found coffee in a small parlour where faint wafts of opium drifted from the house next door. “Have you followed your nose?” Yusuf asked, once Nicolo had finished the last of the pot and asked politely for another. “Or are we just caught in one of fortune’s waves?”

“You’ve the sea on your mind again. Would you like to go next door?”

Yusuf paid for the coffee, and then the opium, thick and tar-sweet, a hammer to the temple of all worries.

Once again they found themselves side-by-side, a laugh shared between, somewhere near the Mediterranean not very far from Jerusalem, where they had met. _It’s changed in eight hundred years_ Yusuf wanted to say, but the opium had smothered him, until all he could conceive of doing was kissing Nicolo gently, on the corner of his mouth, between the mole he had discovered with delight the first time Nicolo had let himself be shaved and the place where his lips met his cheek.

“Such romance.” Nicolo tucked his hand across the back of Yusuf’s head, under the fall of cloth which covered him, and gripped hard. “Here?”

There was nobody else in their vicinity, a small curtain separating their bliss from that of others, an empty room waiting to be filled with soft sighs and deep breaths.

“Perhaps we will be chased if we’re not chaste.”

Nicolo did not give him the laugh he’d hoped for, but the kiss was all and more, soft-edged and blurred, still, a corona of lassitude around them both. Yusuf kindled in an instant, unsure if he thought the idea of Nicolo entering him here, in the dubious privacy of a place made hospitable only by circumstance was a good one, but nonetheless, he urged him to it, and found himself half-smothered, the weight of Nicolo’s body above him and the great lungfuls of smoke still lingering in his chest.

They fell asleep together, and woke up sobered by a dream of death and mud. “We must find Andromache,” Nicolo said, all the simmering heat of the moment gone, the sun feeling odd and distant on their exit after their quick, cold visit to another’s mind. “And this Frenchman.”

“So--”

“Yusuf, don’t say it.”

“Back to piracy?”

“I think this muddy Frenchman will love you,” Nicolo said, very seriously. “Maybe you can teach him to laugh.”

4.

There was no pressing reason for them to be in Berlin, but there was no true reason for them to be anywhere, these days. Andy was meeting a contact, and Booker was in the bar beneath the building, getting quietly hammered on old stocks of East German vodka the bartender sold under the table.

The world had changed around them, and Nico liked the music. He hadn't had the capacity to imagine it as music, considering it sounded a lot like scraping metal together, but there was rhythm to it, a pounding grind that something deep in his mind appreciated.

Joe eyed him sideways the third time he leaned out the window to catch a hint of it, wondering where it was coming from. Joe’s notebook, spread on his naked lap, had a shape that must have been Nico in it, craning an elbow over the balcony, all elbow and neck. “You want to go out?”

“I don't know where out is. Isn't it interesting? The music.”

“That's a word for it.”

“I want to go out.”

There was no longer a wall in Berlin, but Berlin still held the shadows of it, the shape and length of its presence a spine through the city. Andromache and Booker had been there for when it fell. Joe and Nicky had been there too, in another part of the city, working on the other side of the wall for the same goals. Nicky had always liked Berlin, in all its industrial contrasts. He liked the people.

“What’s on your mind?” Joe asked, when Nicko found himself something to wear, trying to feel out what fabric he was in the mood for. Joe had already dressed, or rather had already been dressed, armed for the cold in black, a scarf at the ready over the shoulders of his jacket.

“I’m not sure.”

“You look like you’re ready for a fight,” Joe pointed out, heatless.

Nico looked down at himself. “Ah. Yes. The leather.”

“Is that what you’re in the mood for?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

Joe smiled at him, wolfish and alert. “Okay.”

They walked with purpose, and people got out of the way. They had learned to blend in, to move through crowds like water, but it was late December in a city which cared nothing for its frigid winters and everything for its relative freedom, and Nico liked it enormously, the way they could walk around on its flat, wide streets and link arms, the way Joe could lean into him and make him laugh, the way it sharpened them both into greyscale versions of themselves, lit by electric light.

“Same place as last time?”

“Why not?” Nico said. Sometimes familiarity was a joy.

The maze of rooms beneath the city were always full of people, parties going on in places where nothing had been regulated out of existence yet, full of the young and the recently aged, people of every shape, size and colour, battered by music and pressed up against each other.

This particular place had a maze of backrooms, a warren for the most curious rabbits, and Joe knew everybody who was a fixture, because they were fixtures too, in their own way.

Nico just wanted to dance, for a bit. He was no dancer, and never had been, unlike Joe, who was light on his feet and loved to move, but all he needed was Joe nearby and a beat to listen to, and the body did the rest, as did the drinks and the little tablet Joe slipped into his mouth with his tongue.

Euphoria crested through him slowly, colours turning brighter, shadows deepening in the corners of the cavernous room, sweat dripping vividly down his back, a slick patch of wetness tracing his spine.

“Room’s free if you want it,” someone said, an indeterminate voice, hazy under the music and the drugs.

Once, Nico might have been frightened by the loss of his faculties, the ability to tell which sound was coming from where, but as long as Joe was nearby, the fear became dull, and soon the acidic, chemical high took hold, blurring time and sound together until he felt himself laughing for no reason, as Joe led him deeper into the basement.

Nico remembered this. He remembered becoming pliant in Joe’s grip, the weird tilted table, the intriguing straps, and the way Joe murmured things in his ear as he used them that made Nico’s breath catch in his chest.

Joe set about taking him apart with fingers and tongue, pushing Nico’s clothes aside until they were their own kind of binding, shirt tucked up under his arms, trousers trapping his knees, cool, damp air raising the hair off his body as Joe stepped back to look at what he’d done. The lights were singing, a strange glow in strips overhead, turning the crown of Joe’s hair pale, catching in his teeth, which were smiling at him.

“You’re a-- ah, I can’t even call you a sadist,” Nico managed, on fire to the tip of his toes. The music was distant, a bony throb in the back of his mind, the well-worn cuffs around his wrists trapping the blood which moved past them just enough that Nico could feel it, cellular motion beneath his skin.

He was so hard he thought he might faint, and Joe was laughing at him. “You look nice like this, Nicky.” He flicked a finger in again, tracing a well-worn path neither of them had ever grown bored of. “Kind of like you want to kill me.”

Lights flickered around the corner of Nico’s vision, mocking and bright. “Maybe choke you a little, if you don’t hurry up.”

Joe pressed in close, the weight of his body straining Nico’s lax hips, Joe’s fingers still ruthlessly inside him, his other hand finally finding a rhythm on his cock. “I’ll hurry up when I feel like it, Nicky,” Joe said, and kissed him, smothering the protest before Nico could form it.

The euphoria took hold of him again, and Nico couldn’t have said how much time passed, save that his climax came through him like a surprise, a burst of something closer to joy and relief than pleasure.

Coming off the high was like sliding back into his own skull, and in the morning Joe made him real coffee, the kind they’d been drinking for almost a thousand years which nobody made better than him, and Booker glared at them both, a twitch of knowledge jumping in his jaw. “Did you two have fun?” he asked, acerbically. “What was it this time? Ecstasy? Acid?”

“You should come with us next time,” Joe said easily. “Andy has.”

Booker took out a flask and emptied it into his mouth in an undignified stream. "Why can't you ever fuck during the day?"

“You need more fun, Booker,” Nico said, more seriously, the edge of the comedown only barely scraping him.

“I have fun,” he lied, before he disappeared from the kitchen, leaving Andy behind.

“The same place as last time?” she asked Nico, helping herself to Joe’s breakfast. “You look like shit.”

“Where to next, boss?” Joe asked, stealing it back, smiling like a cat. “And he doesn’t. He looks perfect.”

5.

Joe still liked Italy, though there were parts of it he liked more than others. Genoa was a place Nicky didn't love to visit, so they often ended up in Rome, seat of an ancient empire, filled with bad tourists and good food, hot sun and cold wine.

“Wow,” Nile said, when they opened the shutters of their attic flat, one Nicky had owned for centuries under various names. “I mean, _wow._ ”

“It is a beautiful city,” Joe heard Nicky agree. “But we should get some sleep. Then we’ll take Andy out to dinner, no?”

“What’s the occasion?” Andy asked, hefting one of the scimitars Joe had left on the wall in the kitchen, under the rosette window.

“Because we can,” Joe said. “Because it’ll be fun.”

They slept, and they woke, and Nicky joined Joe in the shower.

“She’s so young,” Nicky said, plastered to Joe’s front, wrapped around him as though he might disappear if Nicky let go of him. “Everything is amazing to her. It’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Makes a change from Booker,” Joe found himself saying, though the wound was fresh and he didn’t truly want to prod it. “Ah, sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Nicky said, pulling back just enough to grab some desiccated soap off the dusty shelf he’d put up eighty years ago, last time they’d done any significant renovation. The roof was in good shape, that was all that mattered.

Joe let Nicky wash him, because he liked it and Nicky liked doing it. “Do you think she likes sports?”

“I think we should ask her.” Nicky stepped out and tossed a towel over the sink for him, disappearing into the bedroom.

Joe found their box of resin and paper exactly where they’d left it, in the library under on top of an atlas of North Africa Nicky had found and bought for Joe to laugh at, and because it was mid-afternoon and Joe felt almost as though he were grieving someone who he hadn’t known well enough to miss, he shook out the dessicated remnants from the bowl of a long-stemmed pipe, revived some well-preserved resin and lit it with a cracked match. It smoked slowly, gaining a bit of draw when he coaxed some into his lungs, and when he turned around Nicky was watching him, shirtless and dry.

“I’m going to open the shutters,” he said, and did, throwing open the balcony doors, Rome spread out burnt-orange beneath them, all its hills and ruins still beautiful after such a long time.

Joe smoked, and thought, and watched him.

“What?” Nicky asked, when he saw Joe watching him.

The smoke had caught him, curling into his mind through his lungs. “I am very lucky,” he said.

“We are.” Nicky reached for the pipe and set it between his teeth, coaxing a last bit of smoke from it while he chose a book. “Did you put this here?” He hefted a flimsy paperback copy of _Divina Commedia_ with disdainful fingers.

Everything seemed tremendously funny, suddenly. “Maybe.”

“Then you’ll have to suffer it,” Nicky said, poking him in the ribs as he slouched down next to him on the couch and put his feet up on the reading table, opened the book to its stiffened first pages and cleared his throat. “Are you ready? _Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita…”_

Joe was laughing quietly at Nicky’s overwrought performance of the verse when Nile appeared, wearing a shirt which Joe knew to be Andy’s, her beautiful dark face gleaming in the evening sun as she looked at the balcony first with naked appreciation.

The look in her eyes changed when she sniffed the air and stopped mid-motion, her long fingers resting on the spine of a first edition of something or other.

“Evening,” Andy said, following her in, her hair sticking up, a crease in her face from a pillow, not quite disappearing fast enough. Ah, such small things, new all over again.

“Wait,” Nile said, taking them in. “Are you guys _high_?”

Andy burst out laughing, a bright, mortal sound. “Don’t worry, Nile. They like to share.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Arrives five years later with acid]
> 
> Hope you enjoyed it! I'd love to hear about it if you did.
> 
> You can visit me on tumblr for more shitposts about catholics here --> https://formerlyfebricant.tumblr.com/post/624797688580456448/five-times-joe-and-nicky-got-high

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Illustrious Pagans](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25904851) by [greedy_dancer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greedy_dancer/pseuds/greedy_dancer)




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